Over the Brink
by Zapenstap
Summary: When a rusty and angsty perfect soldier confronts the Zero System about his destiny, one obsession surfaces from the deep. Conclusion: Certain promises must be kept. Relena must die. Or is that not what Zero means? 1xR. postseries, no EW. REVIEW


Post series. No Endless Waltz or intervening manga. Angsty Heero. Gundam battle with Zero System.  1xR.

Over the Brink

By zapenstap

            The fighting would never really be over.

            Heero Yuy stood in the hangar of a space shuttle, suited up in his space gear, helmet dangling on the fingers of his right hand.  He stood near the back, looking out though a window at the stars as the ship slipped silently through space.  There was no noise out there, in space, no sound at all.  The silence could cause a man to go crazy.  Heero had heard workers talking about it sometimes, and ex-soldiers too.  Space was an unnatural habitat for a man, a place he could visit and observe, but not a place where he was meant to live.

            It reaffirmed his earlier proposition.  Man could never forget the Earth.

            As he thought of it, the blue orb came into view, as he had expected.  It always surprised him how large it was, and also how small.   The Earth was a planet, something massive and complicated hosting a million forms of life existing in a mutually dependent, interconnected ecology.  It was beautiful and powerful and fragile all at once.  It supported man and endangered him.  It was a testing ground for the living, a battlefield for survivors.  Socially speaking, it was what Dorothy Catalonia had called a Warrior's Paradise.

            Some people were still intent on destroying it.

            Which only proved his other proposition; humanity was weak.  Even himself.  The first part was readily obvious, but it took a long time to admit that last part.  It involved admitting he was human for starters, and also part of humanity, which was not quite the same thing.  He knew the species to which he belonged, but he was used to looking at himself as an outside vessel, something connected to but not constructed of the same motivations and desires that drove other people, normal people.  The Perfect Soldier was what they called him. Treize had seemed to imply that he was the closest thing to a God.  

            Drawing away from the window, Heero turned his head slightly, glancing over his shoulder at Wing Zero, waiting patiently and silently in the hangar in its bird form, the fresh paint gleaming under the lights.   No expression touched Heero's face to betray his feelings, but he looked at Wing and felt something stir, a recognition of the size and power of that machine, an appreciation and apprehension for its deadly beauty. 

            Heero didn't believe in God.  What he did believe was that being the Perfect Solider and being a human being were incongruous.  They couldn't coexist.  In a war, a perfect solider was a soldier who did not question orders, who accomplished what was asked of him without complaints and who needed no excuses for failure because he did not fail.  The Perfect Soldier had no desires, no fears, no needs, and no use for mercy or sympathy.  If mercy or sympathy were required, it was a human affair, to be decided by somebody human.  The Perfect Soldier who retained a shred of humanity hoped his leader, the one giving the orders, was still human, but in the event that he was not… that's when things became confusing.  The doubts.  The feelings.  The moral crisis.  The observation of the human condition.  The pity he felt at exploiting it.

            It had started with saving that girl.  Relena Peacecraft.  His objective had been to destroy her.  So easy.  So obvious.  But he hadn't for some reason, and he still didn't know why.  And it had started also with allowing for comrades, making friends, forming alliances, accepting help…accepting weakness.  Accepting doubt, despair, the notion that failure at some point was inevitable, accepting that he was still human, still a man, that he was responsible for his own fate.  So he had chosen to survive, because some girl kept asking him to promise that he would come back alive.  Or maybe for another reason. It was all so unclear.

            Heero looked back at the window, watching the Earth drift by, watching the stars flicker weakly in the blackness that surrounded and threatened to swallow them.  Space was so empty.

            It had been awhile since he felt sure about anything.  His state of mind when conscious was chaotic at best, and sleep brought unwanted dreams.  He hadn't been in a battle for a long time.  He wanted to fight again. He didn't know for sure if he still could, if he was still the same man he had been, or if he had somehow become… less.  The war was over, but the fighting continued in some places.  There would be battles to be fought and he had Wing Zero.  He hadn't used it in a long time, but that didn't matter; he could still fight.  He knew nothing else to do with his time, his skills, his life.  He didn't have other skills.  He didn't have another identity.  So he needed to preserve this one.

            He told himself he was still the Perfect Soldier and that he had no desire to be less.  As long as he was fighting he would be the Perfect Soldier.  That was his training, his conditioning.  It was his rearing.  He had never had any other lessons.  He could feel it in him, the contempt that surfaced sometimes when he overheard conversations, contempt for other people, for weak soldiers, for civilians, for those fools who did not dare to look death and face and laugh at it.   His whole life he trained and worked and molded himself to fight without handicaps.  It couldn't be undone in a day, or a week or a year, or even a decade, maybe not ever  He still wasn't sure he wanted it undone, not while there was still fighting, even a shred of fighting.  If he allowed himself to become human, he wasn't sure he would be able to kill again.  

            And yet, he could feel the humanity in him too, warring with the soldier in him, threatening to overwhelm it.  He had desires if he thought about them, but he didn't.  If he thought too much about it he wouldn't be able to do his job.  The Perfect Soldier and the human being could not coexist, and because he was both, unable to shake either, the strain was beginning to kill him.  One needed to be chosen.

            A string of curses from the cockpit broke his concentration. Heero let a hand trail along the glass of the window, leaving streak marks across the picture of the Earth, and turned away.  He lifted his helmet under his arm as walked up the stairs and pushed open the doors.

            The cockpit was large and round with a front data board relaying the image in front of the ship though a cameras positioned on the outside.  Alternate angles could be viewed depending on the coordinates controlled by the three people working the panels up front.  A young technician named Matt Black was monitoring the ship's internal functions a few steps to Heero's right.  The captain leaned against the stabling bar in the middle of the room, conversing with a blonde woman who was his second in command.  She was also his lover, as far as Heero could tell, as far as he cared.

            Heero waited for his presence to be noticed before speaking.  "What's the problem?" he asked tonelessly.  

            "We're being signaled by unidentified spacecraft to turn around."

            Jim Hargrove was the name of the vessel's captain.  Heero didn't know him personally.  He didn't know anybody on this ship and didn't care, but Hargrove was an ex-alliance soldier and a good pilot, so Heero trusted him to get him where he wanted to go without annoying him with too many questions.  Soldiers understood privacy.  Heero had needed transportation for himself and Wing Zero to the Earth.  These people sufficed.

            "We don't have enough fuel to turn around," second in command Sheila Evans reminded the captain, speaking just loud enough for everybody to overhear without actually addressing them.  "Why do they want us to turn around?"

            "Troublemakers," Jim said with a shrug.  "They've got mobile suits and a bad attitude.  Maybe they're part of some faction resisting the peace."

            Heero said nothing.  Instead, he watched the screens relaying the information on the spacecraft blocking their path.  From the numbers alone, he was able to determine the make and models of the suits.  They were old OZ suits, Taurus-models, updated for speed and agility.  And mobile dolls.

            "If they pose too much of a problem, I'll take care of it," he said to everyone and no one.  The crew working the panels became very quiet, making small movement.  Those in a position to look at him averted their eyes so that their focus landed on his hands or shoes rather than the dark gleam of his eyes.  They were afraid of him.  He knew it, and felt nothing.

            Jim's cigarette tilted halfway out of his mouth.  "I appreciate that, kid, and I know you're capable, but I don't want to get in trouble over something like this.  We'll ask them what the problem is first."

            "I don't think they want to negotiate," Heero told him, not because he needed to assert himself, but merely because it was true.  Efficiency over diplomacy.  "They're disgruntled members of the White Fang."

            The deep blue eyes in Sheila's square, chiseled face widened slightly.  "How can you tell?"

            Heero didn't feel like explaining how he recognized the formation they had used to block their transport or the signals they were using to contact each other.  He didn't want to bother telling them that he understood the numerical code that was running vertically down Matt Blake's panel.  Blake was Jim's computer wizard.  No doubt he was trying to hack that code now.  Letting him decipher it on his own would only prove Heero right.

            "I'll go get ready," Heero said, turning away from Jim and Sheila both without answering Sheila's question.  "They look like they're looking for an excuse to cause a disturbance," he said over his shoulder.  "They might attack you."

            "That doest justify us attacking them, though," Sheila muttered.

            "I won't strike unless they do," Heero assured them, pausing at the entrance to the hangar.  "Zero will pick up your communication.  I'll stay in the hangar until I'm needed.  Feel free to negotiate if you want.  At most it might help if you find out what it is they're up to."

            "Yeah," Jim said. "Thanks for the reassurance.  Doesn't seem like I can stop you, I guess, but I'll try a peaceful solution first, in honor of the Vice Foreign Minister's efforts.  As you say, having information about what they're up to would probably benefit the reconstruction movement.  They say Relena Peacecraft is working hard to stamp out these anti-peace factions and keep the weapon destruction progression moving along smoothly.  We'd like to help if we can."

            Heero's eyes latched onto Jim for a few moments, though the captain may or may not have been aware of it.  Relena Peacecraft. He clenched his jaw to keep from saying anything, but he wondered if Jim's conception of Relena could possibly be anything like his.  The Peace Princess: a blonde girl with blue eyes, average height for a girl, small-breasted; not much of an icon or debutant to look at her.  His first impressions were memorable.  He remembered her best as that uniformed, impulsive, intrusive girl who ripped up a blue dress with her own hands to bandage the wound of a stranger and then leapt in front of a gun.  She was educated, though, and she spoke eloquently. There was power in her words and in the unblemished youth people found so inspiring.  She was a princess and a diplomat and she had tried to be on his side.  She had done the world a lot of good. It had justified letting her live, justified protecting her, even justified helping her create her ideal world.  He helped her create it with blood and fire, but he had helped.  He wondered if she really understood, even now.  Relena Peacecraft.  The girl who made him promise to come back alive.  The girl who didn't seem to want him to be the Perfect Soldier.  He didn't understand that.  Her dream would not have succeeded without him.

            Jim caught his eyes and Heero turned smoothly away.  Heero knew what his eyes must have looked like.  He had probably looked angry.  Jim's eyes had answered with a mean stare as any threatened soldier would, but then puzzlement had flashed through his eyes when he had realized that Heero was not glaring at him, but at something he couldn't see.  Heero turned away before he had to watch Jim think through what he had said trying to figure out what had triggered the gundam pilot.

            Letting the door swing shut on his heels, blocking the others out, Heero descended into the hangar.  Pushing extraneous thoughts to the back of his mind, he approached Wing Zero with his usual challenge, glaring up at the machine with his usual tenacity.  He was going into battle.  This machine was his life and purpose.  It was with this weapon that he had formed the only relationship he would ever have.

            Settling himself into the cockpit was a procedure so familiar he hardly thought while doing it and didn't remember the steps later.  Suited in black and red, he turned on his computers and adjusted his signal to pick up the outlying transmissions.

            "…don't have to get nasty about it."

            Jim was apparently trying to negotiate.  

            "We're taking over this area," came the reply, somewhat garbled by static and gaps in the transmission.  Switching on his video screens, Heero locked onto the vessel's cameras and redirected the video to Wing.  A platoon of Taurus suits and mobile dolls flickered into being.

            They were in the defensive formation Heero recognized from the numbers inside.  That the dolls were there at all was reason enough to engage in battle.  No one would miss them and the world was a safer place without them.  Lady Une had commanded to destruction of all weapons.  He wanted out of the hangar in any case.

            Heero tapped into Jim's main computer.

            "Open the hangar," he said.  "I'm going out."

            "We're still talking," Jim replied.  He had lost his cigarette, but he smoothed the scruff of a beard on his neck and throat in a fidgeting way. "Just hang on a moment."

            "They won't let you through and they have mobile dolls," Heero told him.  "I won't let the dolls go, but if the men choose to surrender after I have destroyed them, I won't stop them from running."

            "Now hold on a minute," Jim began. "These guys are restless with the new peace procedures, but they're not in a murderous mood."

            Heero had already hacked through the control system of Jim's ship, but he paused to find out more.  "Did you find out what they want?"

            "They're not very explicit, but they seem to be harboring the same old grudges.  They don't trust the Earth.  They want the Vice Minister removed from office because she represents the Earth, not them.  They want a colonist to be the Vice Foreign Minister between the Earth and the Colonies if we have to have one."

            Heero's hand hovered over the last imputation of code that would open the hangar. "Did they say what they were planning to do?"

            "They're part of an embargo movement trying to block resources and travel between Earth and Space.  They don't seem very organized, though.  Why don't you just…"

            Heero opened the hangar.  "Roger that."

            Heero heard a surprised shout of indignation from Matt Blake as Heero took control of his panel and opened the hangar. Space rushed in as air rushed out.  Wing Zero responded as Heero disengaged the lock system and rolled backward, jetting out of the vessel and slipping into Space.   Wing Zero, usually stored in bird formation in a cargo hold, leveled out, drifting with inertia as Heero passed the command to close the hangar and keyed in the mecha transformation sequence.

            The Taurus suits saw him eject and turned curiously, raising weapons.  They didn't recognize the bird at first, but the shift caught their full attention.  Fear and surprise hissed through the receiver.  The familiar "it's a gundam" came through his sound receiver from several shocked voices.

            Whether responding to a pre-set program or a manual order, the mobile dolls immediately launched an attack.  Adjusting his position, Heero propelled Wing above the line of fire and reversed with an agility the dolls could not hope to match.

            With the first movement, the Zero System went into effect.

            Heero gasped, mentally stretching his thinking as his consciousness expanded from the sheer flood of data pouring into his skull from a virtual nowhere.  It had been a long time since he had used it… Gritting his teeth, he concentrated, searching for that place…that mastery he had found in the war.  It eluded him.  Something must be distracting him.

            The Zero System didn't wait for him to get a handle on the problem.  It was the _Zero System because it did not wait._

            Images bombarded his mind; memories drudged up from the past, feelings and sensations associated with the present, memories, images, sensations and numbers of the enemy, all of it feeding into his conscious brain faster than he could process it.  Everything that was the enemy, everything that was the situation, everything that was the past and present, everything that was the environment and everything that was _him merged together until he suddenly could predict… anything. _

            He could predict the mobile dolls, and he destroyed them.

            _You have to master the system._

            The first mobile doll to explode didn't see him coming.  The second had no time to react.  

            _You've done it before._

            Explosions flashed like supernovas as mobile dolls exploded.  He gasped, pulling back, struggling under the influence of the system.  Jim's vessel barely evaded a shot from the buster rifle.

_            You are the Perfect Soldier._

            Confidence should have returned, but his unconscious thoughts assailed him.  Faces he half recognized slid across his eyes.  His training, the details of his childhood, poured forth in memory with vivid detail.  Were those his mother's hands?   

_            The fighting will never really be over_

            Was he doing the right thing?  Was he meant to interfere in this, to fight again?

            Zero rushed him with answers.

            _I am doing this for Jim to get through to the Earth._

            Zero disagreed. 

            Heero accepted that.  When it was that clear, Zero was always right.

            _I am doing this because it needs to be done.  Weapons are a threat to peace._

            Zero flickered.  Doubt.  

            _What are you?_

            Was Zero asking him?  Or was he asking himself?  His head pounded.  It ached.  He could feel his thoughts beginning to tear.  He couldn't tell the past from the future, the friend from the enemy.  

            _Who is my enemy?_

            Did he say that out loud?

            The White Fang.  No, the mobile dolls.  

_            What are we fighting about?  _

            Jim's face.  A memory of a voice.  "They want the Vice Minister removed from office."

            _What future do I desire?_

            Relena's face.  

            _I'll kill you._

Was that the future?

            All the suppressed thoughts and feelings and desires gushed up like water from a flooded, underground well.  Images crashed into him, sweet but fierce as fire.  He saw her, the girl in the blue dress bandaging his wound with a strip from her own gown, no fear in her face, no concern for her safety.  Her hands were so delicately shaped. He saw the same girl on a bench in the Sank Kingdom, knees and ankles pressed together, a lady looking directly into his eyes.  In his room above a party where neither of them had really intended to dance, she told him all the things she knew.

            _"I'm on your side now."_

            Images of Relena flashed through his head, all the times he had seen her during the war, all the times he had checked up on her after… for business.  Business!   

            Zero disagreed.

            The system fluctuated.  This was not relevant data.  The system was for battle.  He was being distracted.  He could lose his mind this way!  

            _Zero…_

            He saw her at a podium and in a plane and at a business meeting, but he also saw her on the sand at the beach, in a bathing suit with sand stuck on her heels.  He saw her in company, at parties, sipping champagne in the company of young diplomats with glittering, predatory eyes.  He saw her laughing, evading their hands from touching her shoulders, her waist, refusing dances.  He saw her looking around, at the crowds, in the corners, up in the sky, not seeing him, but scanning…scanning….  

            _"Heero, I want you to make me a promise."_

            And he saw her in her room, undressing for bed, and remembered the way he hadn't been able to look away, the way his chest had tightened up, his face had flushing uncharacteristically because he hadn't meant to see this…  He remembered wanting to turn away.  Wanting to! But the shirt came over her head and the skirt removed from her hips, pooling on the floor, and her shoulders were bare and her legs visible from ankle to thigh and he hadn't turned away.  She brushed her hair behind her shoulder and turned from the window she though adequately covered by a curtain. He saw only shadows as she unclasped her bra and pulled a nightgown over her head, but he could see the shadows.

            No!

            _I'm not this human!  Not this weak.  I don't care about..._

            Zero disagreed.

            The shock of it pulled him out of the depths.  In the great need to escape those images that threatened to shatter his control, he suddenly remembered.  The memory of mastering the system.   The future…

            _I am a solider!_

            He pulled away forcibly, and maybe he screamed, but his consciousness expanded, letting the data pour through without focusing on any of it.  He was a sieve for a stream of information to run through.  Relena trickled through and vanished like smoke, buried once more in the deeps.  His distraction, emotions, and uncertainties skittered like flickers of flame on a glass bubble.  His mind sunk into a void, clear of all extraneous thoughts, harbored and protected by emptiness.  

            His body cooled as he sweated, hanging his head, breathing deeply.

            An incoming video feed blinked imploringly on his receiver panel. Straightening with an effort, Heero punched it through and the face of a man ten years Heero's senior, garbed in retired White Fang uniforms, flickered up on his screen.

            "Gundam Pilot, please hold your fire!  We surrender."

            "Roger that."

            It seemed he had destroyed all the dolls, though he didn't remember doing it, not really.  It also seemed that all the White Fang remnants were alive, and they were retreating, scattering as soon as Heero pulled back, raising the weapon he had aimed at them.  

            Heero sat in the cockpit of Wing Zero, drifting in a state of half-consciousness, his damp, sweat-drenched hair plastered to the back of his chair.  He swallowed and breathed deep, listening to the hum of the machine as it checked and tuned itself.  When he closed his eyes he saw the battle as it had taken place in its entirety, both what happened and his delusions while fighting.  It was like the Wind Zero was singing to him.

            Relena.

            He had protected her for the peace of the universe, but here war went on because of her.  He had heard that others could do her job, that she wasn't as important now as she once had been.  

            She was a dangerous distraction.  It was his doubts about her, his sentiments for her, which had upset the system and kept him from mastering it.  His control was a façade over a river of discontent about Relena Peacecraft and Zero had seen right through it.

            The fighting would never really end.

            He would be a soldier until he died.  He had wanted to survive, but maybe he had had it right before.  Death was his future, but before he could die he had a job to do.  

            The Zero System flickered around him.

            Relena was a distraction.  The Perfect Soldier could allow for no distractions.  The world did not need her.  She was an icon. She would serve as well as a dead martyr, perhaps better.

            Maybe it was time to make good on his promise.

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